The customer experience is the new competitive battleground. Deon Scheepers, strategic consultant at Genesys Scheepers, says customer experience drives customer loyalty, reduces customer churn and creates a competitive advantage and differentiation.
A contact centre survey conducted by ITWeb in partnership with Genesys revealed that the majority of the South African businesses who respondents (87%) view the customer experience as extremely important to their company's success.
"Research shows that companies focused on customer experience outperform companies that have no, or little, focus on customer experience in revenue, growth and shareholder value. Most organisations today do realise the importance of providing good customer experience, and this is correctly reflected in the survey," comments Scheepers.
The most common problem, however, is in the creation and implementation of the customer experience (CX) strategy, he adds.
"We see many organisations that say CX is important to them, but they don't have a formulated and communicated customer experience strategy."
But the ITWeb / Genesys survey found that 74% of organisations do have a customer experience strategy in place.
"Organisations must be aware that a CX strategy should include the entire organisation and not just the customer service centre or contact centre," Scheepers says.
The survey results were in line with a customer-centric focus, as 80% of respondents ask their customers what their service expectations and requirements are. Only 14% said they do not.
Touch points
"The customer service centre or contact centre has an important, even critical, role in any organisation's customer experience strategy," says Scheepers. "Organisations must, however, be aware that a CX strategy should include the entire organisation and not just the customer service centre or contact centre. Customers will be emotionally influenced and form an opinion about your organisation when interacting with or experiencing your brand and brand promise via multiple channels and customer touch-points."
Only 15% of the companies surveyed have outsourced the call centre function, while over 70% own and manage their contact centre. Of those, only 11% are making use of cloud computing or cloud based contact centre technology.
Only 15% of the companies surveyed have outsourced the call centre function, while over 70% own and manage their contact centre.
Just under half of the respondents (46%) noted their contact centre currently uses quality assessment and monitoring tools, and over half (55%) of these are currently using voice/call recording technologies.
According to Scheepers, the top three most commonly used quality assessment tools are voice/call recording, quality assessment forms/scorecards, and customer feedback surveys. Voice/call recording allows the recording of all voice interactions with customers, which can then be used by supervisors and/or quality assessors to evaluate the quality of the customer interaction and identify any agent development or training needs, he elaborates.
About the survey
The 2016 Contact Centre Survey was run online on ITWeb for a period of two weeks, in December 2016, to gain insights into the contact centre strategies of South African companies. Among these were answers to the following questions:
1 How important is customer experience to organisations?
2 Do organisations have a customer experience strategy?
3 What method of customer interaction do contact centres offer?
Who responded
* A total of 148 responses were received.
* 19% of respondents were CEOs or MDs, and 54% were from IT middle management.
* 23% of survey respondents were from large companies with between 501- 5 000 employees, and 21% were from multinationals with over 10 000 employees.
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